


Serena Joy: a woman's place

by Metabird (wheatear)



Series: Character archetypes [14]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV), The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Character Analysis, Female Characters, Feminist Themes, Game of Thrones Spoilers, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Patriarchy, Politics, Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23051290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatear/pseuds/Metabird
Summary: If a female character wants to succeed in a patriarchal society, they either have to work to meet society's expectations or fight to make society accept them as they are. A meta analysis of Serena Joy's role in Gilead.
Series: Character archetypes [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1655167
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Serena Joy: a woman's place

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the halfamoon challenge at Dreamwidth.

What kind of woman _really_ flouts convention? Most female characters don't. They might behave badly in the sense of breaking the law or rebelling against authority, but then I'd almost guarantee that they still abide by conventional standards of beauty and/or femininity. Most Strong Female Characters™ are like this. Female characters with unconventional personalities still seem quite rare.   
  
Convention itself isn't a bad thing. We're all following convention when we walk on the pavement instead of the road, take turns speaking or get up for work or school in the morning. Society needs convention to function. But convention can also be unnecessary and limiting. If you are lucky enough to be born with a natural predisposition towards society's expectations of who you should be, then you've got a head start. If your talents are the talents that society values, you have an advantage. If your talents lie elsewhere, if your natural predispositions, ability, personality, physical prowess, whatever, doesn't match up with society's expectations then you've got more of a challenge on your hands.  
  
You also face a choice. If you want to succeed in this society, then you either have to work to meet society's expectations (i.e. **change yourself to fit society**) or fight to make society accept what you want to do and be (i.e. **make society change to fit you**).  
  
How many stories about women fall into one of the above categories? It's depressingly common. Think Arya in _Game of Thrones_ whose whole character arc is an extended version of "I'm not like other girls" (with an unfortunate undertone of "those other girls suck"), or Brienne who to my mind is a much better example of a genuinely unconventional character, but whose shining moment of triumph is finally being knighted after years of fighting tooth and claw to be taken seriously in her field. I loved everything about that scene, but maybe I need to stop consuming media about The Struggle* because goddamn it can feel exhausting.  
  
*Against the patriarchy. You know what I mean.  
  
Of course I'm now about to talk about **Serena Joy** who is from a canon that is all about The Struggle, but in a way I prefer that: I'd rather get my concentrated dose of fighting the patriarchy from _The Handmaid's Tale_ where it's the central focus than a subplot in a show about something else because that's just how women's narratives go, you know?  
  
The interesting thing about Serena Joy is that she does both of the things I mentioned earlier: she adapts her own behaviour to meet societal expectations (she is a model Gilead woman) _and_ she changed society to make it define an ideal woman as exactly the sort of woman Serena thought all women should be. The title of Serena's book _A Woman's Place_ says it all. But here's the problem she created for herself.  
  
The problem with convention, as I said, is that it's _limiting_. It's restrictive. You take a pre-approved set of characteristics and put them in a box and anyone who can fit in the box is good and anyone who falls outside it has failed. What society should strive to do, therefore, is to **make that box as big as possible** while remaining within the limits of human decency. You still need lines. But a free society is more accepting of a wider spectrum of humanity. (This, by the way, is also why a tolerant society should always be intolerant of any view that seeks to go back and add further limitations. Never let anyone make the box smaller.)  
  
What Serena succeeded in doing was not only making that box far smaller, she also made the punishment for straying outside the box far more severe. It wasn't all her, of course; at some point she got shut out of the process when someone added a new limitation that said, oh, by the way only men can make the rules from now on.  
  
The irony of it is profound. In attempting to force society to abide by her own preferred standards, Serena set herself up to fail. She put herself in a cage. Serena badly wants to be the perfect Gilead woman. And yet she finds herself unsuited to the task. That internal contradiction is why I find her so fascinating.


End file.
